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Because the Internet doesn't use any electrical power?

to the research. Even better, the ASU press release went out seven months ago.

http://invsee.asu.edu/Modules/lightbulb/history.htm

"Winding the wires into fine coils, as used in modern incandescent filaments, reduced convective heat loss, allowing the filament to operate at the desired temperatures."

And that directly heated cathodes are not spiral wound?

More info and photos on the Martian rock-ice glaciers of Deuteronilus Mensae.

Now that we've got glaciers and lava tubes, I'm packing up my crampons and caving gear for a Martian vacation!

When I saw them comparing pennies for volume and water for weight, I knew there was some funny business afoot. A drop of water weight a damn lot less than a penny, so (even allowing a lot of room for variation in density) this flash thingie is likely a lot smaller than a penny, or a lot heavier than a drop of water, or they would have chosen some smaller familiar item to compare it with. That, combined with the fact that a "drop of water" is not exactly a well defined quantity, and it screams out for a fact check.

A quick google brought up a freshman chemistry lab report, in microsoft word format, even. Not exactly the paragon of authority, but it is well known that freshman chemistry students have a far greater respect for the truth then marketers.

Their value for the mass of a drop of water is .025 grams, which is twenty-four times less than the .6 grams that the mass of the flash memory. I thought so.

It isn't hard to imagine a .6 gram drop of water, actually, just to be fair to those dorks, but I don't think it would resemble the familiar ones that most of us are accumstomed to.

A long thin wire will require more heat to get to the required temperature for incandescence. If you coil it up, the heat gets trapped, allowing a bit better efficiency. Let me guess; you think modern light bulbs work in a hard vacuum too...

It's really too bad I can't find that excellent PDF that explained how light bulbs work, one of the points was that modern bulbs work with a nitrogen filled envelope and that the filament is the way it is because of many reasons, one of them being the trapping heat thing. Other points included recovery of boiled off tungsten, etc.

I couldn't find my PDF, but perhaps this will convince you: http://invsee.asu.edu/nmodules/lightbulbmod/burnout.html

And I quote :

"The wire is then wound into spirals and double spirals to allow the filament to more efficiently maintain the high temperatures needed. The spiral shape minimizes the convective cooling of the filament by the inert gas in the bulb."

"What is heat if it is not the primary emission of the *heater* filament in your book then ?"

I'm not getting you here. You previously claimed that "secondary emission" is how indirectly cathodes work, this is untrue. That is not what "secondary emission" means. Indirectly heated means it's heated indirectly. I don't know how to be clearer. Perhaps this will help, if we were in space and didn't need the glass envelope, a suitable gas torch could heat up the cathode and it would emit electrons. It would emit them because it is hot, not because of secondary emission from the now non-existent filament.

"filament being wound doubly"

It's not wound, what is your obsession with a tiny minority of specialty triodes and power tubes? The filament is a wire with some insulation, folded over itself a few times. I've cracked open enough tubes to know that. Would like a copy of my Electron Tube Manufacturing Techniques book or what? Do I need to crack open every tube in my vintage Tektronix scope and mail them to you? You won't find a single spiral-wound filament in there. Err, except maybe the CRT. I won't crack that tube open for anyone... And the filament won't emit any electrons, and the cathode won't work by secondary emission.

What do you want? Pictures of a busted 6080? And even if for some reason all the filaments are spiral wound in my scope, it's still not the filaments that emit the electrons, which is how this whole thing started. They just don't glow hot enough in modern "dark cathode" tubes.

Just because I love you, I just went through the trouble of trying to take a picture of a RCA 6AU5 I happen to have lying around. http://tinyurl.com/2ej2og

I trust you can see with thine own eyes the folded bit of wire coated with a bit of insulation that has cracked away from the kinks? That is the filament. It gets red hot. It indirectly heats the cathode. Which emits electrons because it is hot. Not because of secondary emission.

"grid starts emitting electrodes"

That would be awesome.

"and with that I'm off to bed"

Please I urge you, you seem smart but are mysteriously stuck with many misconceptions. Perhaps you are self-taught. Commendable, but it's never OK to just assume what you know is gospel truth; investigate and keep learning, always be ready to discard notions proven wrong.

And yes, I do understand that it is only one factor of four but most cases that find a transformative use in the first factor put very little weight on the other 3. I suggest reading Kelly v. Arriba Soft.

This one seems to be doing fine: http://music.asu.edu/facilities/gammage.htm

Frank Lloyd Wright is an icon in Arizona and rightfully so.

Here's the press release by Arizona State about this: http://asunews.asu.edu/20071023_nanotech

After reading the article, I'd like to see the actual papers they've written on this. A quick peek at a related link suggests that the viruses are in water, or within cells in the water. I want to know what happens when you get multiple media interfaces involved, such as within the body, and the degree to which these boundaries will cause a loss in wave "volume" (does Wired mean amplitude?).
 
My guess is that the experiment involved a very shallow field of activity. The technique as it stands now would be nifty for sterilization, but I'd imagine that to be effective for human viral treatments you'd need a laser wavelength capable of penetrating human membranes at least to the depth of bone marrow. Somebody correct me or back me up on this, please: if we're dealing with EM radiation of a low enough energy, aren't these guys in the domain of short bursts of directed radio waves? If so, then I guess that answers a few of my questions.

This is (more or less) just some people who do a lot of Raman scattering deciding to try their technique to analyze virus particles and then noticing that some of them were damaged in the process. All of the other stuff (in particular the HIV) is largely BS - a few physicists who know almost nothing about biology going after NIH money by putting the magic "HIV" buzzword into their grant applications.

The slightly cool thing about it is that you can target particles below a certain size (like viruses) without causing much damage to larger particles (like host cells).

In terms of actually engineering this into a system for filtering blood (one of the main applications they envision), there are enough problems that it has no hope of succeeding in practice. Even if you could actually overcome all of those and build a system that could use this technique to destroy all of the virus particles in blood on a practical scale, many viruses that could contaminate whole blood (including HIV) will have uncoated and set up shop in the white cells, which would go on to release new virus after the treatment so this would offer no protection at all.

For the same reason, you couldn't use this as a treatment even if you could somehow expose every cell in a patient to these pulses (which would be impossible unless you cut them into paper-thin slices).

If the Tsens are actually unaware of this, then that alone should raise a huge red flag because anyone with the slightest bit of background in virology would know this.

About the only thing this *might* be good for (other than generating press and bilking naive investors out of their money) is as a laboratory technique for killing all of the free virus in a very small sample without harming the cells.

As a scientist, this kind of thing makes me sick, and it illustrates some of the harm caused by profit-motivated research in university settings (in particular, things Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute).

It's great when science and discovery naturally leads to practical (and profitable) products, but this kind of thing is what happens when people put the goal of making money ahead of actually doing real science.

Stop spouting this sourceless & patently wrong drivel.

http://mathstat.asu.edu/support/doc/unix/coping-with-unix/node188.html
supercomputer: The class of fastest and most powerful computers available.

As for the US government's export regulations - the definition of a High Performance Computer (HPC) was raised from 28,000 millions of theoretical operations per second (MTOPS) to 190,000 MTOPS on December 10, 2003.
http://www.bis.doc.gov/hpcs/ArchivedNewsItems.html

Hey, there's a story on the front page that claims "modern humans" only evolved between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, which would throw off the "total humans who ever lived" estimate by quite a bit. I'm not nearly good enough at algebra to redo his numbers, but a fair portion of the total number he gives must have lived in the first 900,000 years that he includes, but which we probably shouldn't. So I still don't know how many people total have lived.

Cheers

I read the article this morning, and thought how awesome would it be! When I logged into myASU today, I saw an ad for it. So I filled out their survey! It consisted of a few questions about MySpace and other social sites, and how much you play certain categories of games. You must have an account with ASU to login and view it, but it's http://www.asu.edu/myworld.

Yeah, it *could* be collaborating... otherwise, annoying MyWorld messages wouldn't pop up every time you log onto a Windows computer in the common computing sites. ~~~~

http://www.asu.edu/myworld/ Login and fill out a survey to be considered for a beta test.

Not all meteorites are stony or nickel iron, a larger meteorite that was primarily ices including ammonia would cause illness symptoms and cause the crater to outgass or 'smoke' as the article reports.

http://knet.asu.edu/research/?getObject=asulib:75906

The work is dated and I've seen nothing else since, but the idea of providing presentations as videos or audio recordings for review by students who can select, speed up, and extract what they need should have merit.

Here's a quote I picked up a few years back's:

"Apparently, American Psychological Association research has shown that while listening to a speaker, people do the following things:

*18% are really listening to the speaker

*25% are having erotic thoughts

*57% are thinking about something else

(Note: I say "apparently" because I read this in a handout I got at the CPSI conference, and haven't been able to find any actual confirmation of this research on the APA site.)

Most people can speak about 150 words per minute, but can hear and comprehend 900-950 words per minute. So after the first 20 seconds or so of a presentation, the audience will fade in and out and think about other things. So, we were told, you can make this work in your favor by drawing a line down the center of your notepaper and recording "in" thoughts on one side, and the "out" thoughts on the other side. This is supposed to free you from trying to remember "out" thoughts, and encourage you to generate ideas without losing track of the presentation. http://www.corante.com/ideaflow/ 20030201.shtml#21117"

Others have noted some web sites of possible value. Here are several more:

http://www.hardscience.info/

http://library.advanced.org/10170/menuw.htm

http://webphysics.iupui.edu/

http://www.aip.org/education/

http://www.falstad.com/mathphysics.html

http://www.vias.org/feee/index.html

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Indexe s/HistoryTopics.html

http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/geometry/content.htm

http://acept.la.asu.edu/courses/phs110/expmts/toc. html

http://nsac.ca/eng/courses/math1000/index.asp

Hope there's something of value there. Jim

I'm confused on one point. (This is not a flame). Why would photons going through a void lose energy?

The energy of a photon is directly proportional to the frequency and inversely proportional to the wavelength.

Photoelectric effect

Shorter wavelengths of a photon (ultra-violet, X-rays, Gamma rays) have more energy than longer wavelengths (visible light, infra-red).

Photons that we see from distant parts of the universe become affected by red-shift - anything moving away from us ends up with a longer wavelength that we would have seen if it were stationary. But this can also be caused by gravititional effects (time dialation causes by massive objects).

If the object is moving towards us, then the photos become affects by blue shift.

When a spiral galaxy is observed, the side moving towards the observer will have a slight blue shift, because the photon wavelength has been decreased.

The photons in the void must be getting a longer wavelength somehow - perhaps the spacetime continuum is expanding more there than it is where there is ordinary matter.

Excellent! Where can we find those?

How about the Internet? Start with the "Male Privilege Checklist": http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2004/09/15/t he-male-privilege-checklist/

Then start reading in the feminist blogosphere, two decent entry points into it are http://pandagon.blogsome.com/ and http://feministing.com/ .

Then begin looking up "white privilege" and "anti-racism", since the strategies are nearly identical between both problem domains. Google for the excellent essay "Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack", normally at http://seamonkey.ed.asu.edu/~mcisaac/emc598ge/Unpa cking.html , but tonight the server is down so try this instead: http://justworld.typepad.com/perspectives/2005/11/ peggy_mcintoshs.html .

After some time it might start making sense.

NASA would be wise to also carefully contemplate what is inducing the dust to rise to form dust storms in the first place. They already have access to THEMIS images from the Mars Odyssey Mission that suggest that there is filamentation of Martian dust storms at both the leading and trailing edges. For a sample image (there are others too), go to:

http://themis.asu.edu/zoom-20060512a

Furthermore, we also know that Martian dust devils can contain lightning bolts at their cores:

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/14jul_dust devils.htm

In addition to that, we also know that firsthand accounts from people who have seen the inside of a tornado and lived to tell about it indicate that tornadoes here on Earth tend to shimmer like a fluorescent light from the inside. This is typically obstructed from the outside by dust. There's a brief mention here. I'm sure there are other sources for this information:

http://library.thinkquest.org/C003603/english/torn adoes/insidetheeye.shtml

This could indicate that tornadoes and Martian dust devils are actually both electrical plasmas, and that the electrical activity is inducing the vortex -- not the other way around.

It is possible that vortexes are the natural result of the right-hand rule within electrodynamics. Peter Thomson's Charge Sheath Vortex site is an excellent tutorial on how this may be so:

http://www.peter-thomson.co.uk/tornado/fusion/Char ge_sheath_vortex_basics_for_tornado.html

He demonstrates his point at the end by creating a miniature vortex using electricity in a petri dish.

My point here is that NASA should seriously consider that the Martian dust is molecularly bipolar and is responding to solar and other electrical plasmas that are affecting the Martian planet. The evidence from both Mars and Earth suggests that it is a possibility.

We already know for a fact that upper atmosphere lightning exists. The weather scientists told us that this was not possible, and they were proven to be wrong. It's now easy to find pictures of upper-atmosphere sprites on the web. Try these:

http://usjma.jp/~sprite/sprite2005.11pic.html

http://www.usjma.jp/~kaminari/Sprite%202006/S%2020 06%20%203/sprite2006.3.13.html

http://www.usjma.jp/~kaminari/Gallery/Gallery%20SP RITE/galleryhome.html

http://www.usjma.jp/~kaminari/Gallery/Gallery%20SP RITE/Carrot/gscar01.html

So, why isn't it possible that they could also be wrong about current theories about tornadoes? And why in the world are those dust storms filamentary? When we see enigmatic features on Mars, we should create future missions to follow that data. As of recently, NASA has been exclusively following their script instead of the anomalies. We need to be doing both.

"... and an embarrassing failure to even casually mention the current term lengths of patents and copyrights as a driving factor behind popular dissatisfaction."

I'm going to ask another one of these "unpopular" questions that slashdot doesn't like. How many illegal copyright violations are within the 14 years that the original copyright stated?

http://hpc.asu.edu/index.php

All of it runs on Linux.

We dont' use "toy hardware"

http://hpc.asu.edu/index.php

And its all running on Linux.

I've recorded crummy raps that are that bad and thought nothing of it.. luckily I'm an anarchocapitalist so I have freedom of expression.

"And it has been shown that the education when people are taught in the home is inferior to the level which the government provides."

Blatant lie. From ... http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v7n8/

" This report presents the results of the largest survey and testing program for students in home schools to date. In Spring 1998, 20,760 K-12 home school students in 11,930 families were administered either the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) or the Tests of Achievement and Proficiency (TAP), depending on their current grade. The parents responded to a questionnaire requesting background and demographic information. Major findings include: the achievement test scores of this group of home school students are exceptionally high--the median scores were typically in the 70th to 80th percentile; 25% of home school students are enrolled one or more grades above their age-level public and private school peers; this group of home school parents has more formal education than parents in the general population; the median income for home school families is significantly higher than that of all families with children in the United States; and almost all home school students are in married couple families. Because this was not a controlled experiment, the study does not demonstrate that home schooling is superior to public or private schools and the results must be interpreted with caution. The report clearly suggests, however, that home school students do quite well in that educational environment."

Of course you are free to disagree with the facts.

"It is that if everyone were home schooled, the level of education would decrease. "

Um, exactly where was this tested?

"The school budget here comes up for a public vote. If people didn't like the schools, they could close them all down with a routine public vote. But the people continually choose to keep them open. Despite any minor flaws, they are very effective and well worth the money. The government does many things right."

All opinions, not facts. Where vouchers have been introduced, quality goes up, costs go down, only to be overturned by the educational establishment elites, who often don't have their own kids in Public Schools. The flaws in schools today aren't minor, when you can't fire a teacher for not teaching.

"Maybe you'd like to tell me the overhead of the average mutual fund, then compare that level of overhead with the public run system. I'll answer the question for you, the administrative fees on the Social Security plan are less than privately managed mutual funds. Yes, that's right, the government is more efficient than the private sector."

Depends on the fund. 1%-6% overhead on mutual funds is common. Here in California, they passed Prop 223, trying to limit Administrative costs to 5%, because they are often much higher. So, I'm not sure where you are getting your information, perhaps a Teacher's Union?

"NeoCons are unrelated to Democrats."

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservative

"The prefix neo- refers to two ways in which neoconservatism was new. First, many of the movement's founders, originally liberals, Democrats or from socialist backgrounds, were new to conservatism."

"That you think otherwise indicates some break with reality, and proves you are incapable of rational thought on the matter."

Uh huh. Okay whatever you say. Because I can back up what I say with facts, and don't resort to name calling and you are not, I can see that you aren't up to rational discussion.

"Fuck off, you nutjob."

Pot, meet kettle.

Just a "me too," as my university has also just moved to a Google solution. I haven't had much to do with it, however, since my university address has been forwarded to gmail for years.

It can't be any worse than that godawful "Blackboard" based system that they had before. I'm not really sure of its pedigree; it was either home-brew that interfaced with BB or it was some kind of abomination that BB managed to sell them. Either way, it blew.

If I wasn't using gmail, I'd probably still be using mail.app or (haha) pine. Update: I just checked and pine doesn't work anymore :( Oh the fun I used to have, telnetting into my email from Mom's house over winter break, getting lost in menu hell, trying to figure out what it did to my attachments... At least they closed the telnet server and require SSH now.

Arizona State University is moving around 65,000 students to Google Apps for Education.

2GB of mail storage, chat, calendar, colaboration, and not locked into Windows.

As I understand it, there definetly is a tiered library system. There is definetly a distinction between a city library and a county library.

Also, have you considered that there actuallly are Federal libraries like, hrrm, say the Library of Congress? Why couldn't we get a digital subscription to thier collected works? :)

Also of note, is that most state funded University libraries are public places. While I am sure that most state citizens can't checkout books without being a student, I think that there are places that allow you to. I'm sure that every library deals with this differently, but I remember that I checked books out of ASU West's library when I was in high school and taking a course at a community college, i.e. not an ASU student.

But don't confuse this THEMIS with the Other THEMIS
http://themis.la.asu.edu/
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) was developed by Arizona State University, Tempe, in collaboration with Raytheon Santa Barbara Remote Sensing. The THEMIS investigation is led by Dr. Philip Christensen at Arizona State University. Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, is the prime contractor for the Odyssey project, and developed and built the orbiter. Mission operations are conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

.... Seriously folks, there have been big corporations and governments trying to influence the way schools go with everything from computers to food. Advertising brought into schools to get kids to buy things. Special interest groups spending money on things schools need to get a new generation of consumers interested in them.

Try:


* Discounts from Apple, Microsoft, etc on computers (I'd link, but I'm going to go with this as a given...)
* Coca-Cola
* Book It (Pizza Hut)
* A growing trend of commercialization of sporting events and buildings
* Large amounts of money being spent by religious lobbies to support Creationist teachings in schools....
* Large amounts of money being spent to promote evolution as a science teaching in schools
* Politicians getting involved in the above 2 items
* Politics derailing attempts to get anything done about improvments in materials and course work.

Where there is money and future political mindsets involved, people will spare no amount of money and/or stupidity on all sides of a debate. It's really too bad that politics and ideology wars have to get in the way of doing what schools should be doing, give the kids the ability to think for themselves instead of telling them what to think.

Implicit in your assumption is that a mission is operated solely by NASA civil service employees, which is a handy assumption for your flip answer, but meanwhile, back in the real world, that's not the case. I'll grant that the people who will be affected have some warning, but I guarantee you Griffin and Co. are already planning on where to reallocate the extended mission money if and when they declare MGS dead. That money doesn't all go to NASA facilities. The science operations for the Mars Orbiter Camera goes to a small company and the Thermal Emission Spectrometer money goes to Arizona State's Mars Space Flight Facility, a place I worked for 4 years and personally witnessed several people get laid off in early '06 because of NASA reallocation for the new manned program and to pay for hurricane damages to NASA facilities.

Yeah, I'm sure the people who got laid off worked something out, and the people who will get laid off will work something out, too. You can continue to choose to "call shenanigans" all you want, but you asked a question, I answered, you didn't like the answer and decided to wave it away with flippant handwaving. This has effects on real people and your "rational ignorance" becomes willful ignorance if you choose to continue to deny it.

Dear Blue Planet,

Thank you for bringing the THOR project to our attention. We find your idea to fire projectiles at high speed into our planet rather disturbing. Should you decide to go through with this plan, please keep in mind the following: remember that asteroid strike that wiped out most large mammals on your strangely-colored planet about 65 million of your years ago? That was us.

Yours in peace, for the moment,
Department of Marsland Security

Dear Mars Department of Blue Planet Studies and Relations:

We have decided that you have outlived your usefulness. Our scientists even as we speak are preparing kinetic strikes against your hidden bunkers.

Regards,
The Blue Planet.

According to the ASU math website at http://www.asu.edu/aad/catalogs/general/department -mathematics-statistics.html there are two degrees offered in math: a B.A. and a B.S. The Intermediate Calculus class is apparently an easier version of "Advanced Calculus I," which is a requirement for the B.S. degree. So the math majors in the class you were in were people getting B.A.'s, which, as you say, are mainly people studying to be teachers. The serious research mathematicians would have been in math 371, and it certainly wouldn't have been the last class they were taking. Also, math 370 is listed on that page as a requirement for math education majors, so I'd be willing to bet that there were a lot of them in the course.

Yes you have. I was in one of the news pieces that aired in Chicago where we presented the "original" technology called the iCare Reader (Link to video) This is a technology that was invented at Arizona State University a LONG time before Kurzwile ever dreamed about it. The research center called CUbiC has been working on developing devices for the blind since 2003. I personally helped develop the software for this and I can say we did it for a LOT LOT Less than 2 million.

Oh and not only that, we took 6 months to develop a product and deploy it to a few locations around Arizona.

This is just an example of the big corporation copying an idea and having the resources to mass produce it. We tried to get some disability companies involved in this but unfortunately they all fell through (I believe the original sale price after all the figures were crunched were around $1500 and it included an 8MP camera too).

Its sad but technology in the market these days for individuals who are blind are VASTLY overpriced. This is because most of this is subsidized by the government so they charge extra knowing that it will be covered by some organization with ties to the government. Not only does this stifle competition but it stifles creativity since the big companies have the the capital to market anything they want and since they have a virtual monopoly on this industry, they can charge whatever they like.

That said, I'd like to welcome our new blind overlords and remind them that I can be useful in rounding up some slaves.

There are two different dichotomies here: 1928 Mickey vs. later Mickey, and drawings of 1928 Mickey that appeared in the original trilogy (Plane Crazy, Gallopin' Gaucho, and Steamboat Willie) vs. newer drawings of 1928 Mickey. I misunderstood your post to mean the latter, that verbatim frames from the trilogy would be permitted under copyright law and under Dastar, while new drawings of 1928 Mickey would be an infringement. If you meant the former, that people would become free to make and sell new drawings of 1928 Mickey while drawings of later Mickey would remain under exclusion, then I apologize.

But has the trilogy's copyright already evaporated?

Here's some mirrored copies

http://www.mars.asu.edu/~gorelick/Descent_On_Titan _1.avi
http://www.mars.asu.edu/~gorelick/Huygens_Movie.mp eg

And another version with more information
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/archive/PIA08117. mov

Here's some mirrored copies

http://www.mars.asu.edu/~gorelick/Descent_On_Titan _1.avi
http://www.mars.asu.edu/~gorelick/Huygens_Movie.mp eg

And another version with more information
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/archive/PIA08117. mov

How does this new version compare to Bacula (http://www.bacula.org/)?

The thing I like about Bacula is that it will allow you to spread a backup job accross multiple tapes, supports backups to disk, has its own scheduling system, and has a native windows client. From what I understand Amanda uses tar and relies upon NFS, SMB, or other network filesystem protocols to work. Bacula on the other hand has a true client/server architecture with a native client running on all of the systems it supports. It also makes use of MySQL to keep track of backup jobs. This made it very easy for me to create a web interface for it (http://raobackup.eas.asu.edu/

If Amanda has been improved to be competitive with Bacula in some of these areas then I'll definitely have to investigate it.

Lee

R. Francis Smith of Sturgeon's Law has a podcast interview with Noel Gorelick of Arizona State University -- the guy behind Google Mars -- who discusses the technical and scientific background behind the project. Listen to it here.

"I would annex the planets if I could."

It's already on its way. I can provide no proof except that I know that people from the THEMIS instrument at Arizona State University http://themis.asu.edu/ were recently seen on Google's campus.

So registered charities with 81% overhead are ethical, or the registered ubercharity diverting 50% of a targeted donation for 9/11 victims is ethical, but this unregistered charity was deemed in advance to be unethical? PayPal decided where you could (or could not) spend your money for you - and that's ethical?

Here is the exciting new logo for this suite. Oddly, it looks nothing like a real sea monkey.

Personally, I think it's a cross between a blue bird and a scorpion stinger.

Martian rock *is* rusty, but it is not carbonaceous. A major goal of the MGS TES instrument (see for example http://tes.asu.edu/) was to look for carbonates, but they never found any. *Small* amounts of carbonates (less than 1 percent) can be found in Martian meteorites, but not enough to be useful.

The major reservoir of CO2, as other posters have pointed out, is in the seasonal polar ice, although a lot of the permanent ice cap is water ice. If you warmed Mars, you'd have more CO2 in the atmosphere, since it wouldn't freeze out over the winter pole anymore.

Asteroids generally do not have a lot of solid gases on them! Maybe you're thinking of comets? Occasionally people propose that some asteroid or other is actually an extinct comet nucleus, and there's some reason to think that the largest one (Ceres) might have some subsurface frozen volatiles or something, but your run-of-the-mill asteroid is rocky or occasionally metallic. Crashing one into the surface of Mars will not add gases to the atmosphere...

Only tens of billions? Maybe Bill Gates is worth tens of billions, but Microsoft is worth far more than that. Which only amplifies your point, of course :)

There aren't a lot of things to say that are really, really new.

http://homepages.law.asu.edu/~dkarjala/OpposingCop yrightExtension/commentary/MacaulaySpeeches.html

Thomas Babington Macaulay was arguing against the extension of copyright in 1841 as having no extra benefit to authors and increasing incentive for piracy through illicit printing presses!

I get this mental image of a black and white mouse on a river boat

You're reproducing an allegedly copyrighted work[1]. Please report to the nearest Disney Store location so that the Thought Police can process you.

[1] The Walt Disney Company may have already lost the U.S. copyright on Mickey Mouse due to a faulty copyright notice.